P: Low Performance when there are a lot of artboards

[jg1231]

When there are a lot of artboards in one PS document, after a while the application becomes really slow. E.g.:

- when selecting layers it sometimes freezes for a few seconds.

- applying paragraph styles is pain in the ass, as every change renders for at least 10 seconds before displaying the change. Interestingly when the text is marked directly in the text field, applying paragraph styles is lightning-fast!

- saving takes almost forever, even when the file is only 150 Mb

- also PS seems to use less RAM than it could. System has 20Gb free RAM and PS seems to write on the working volume...

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Photoshop CC Version 2015.1.2

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My System:

ThinkPad P70
Intel Xeon E3 1505M
Quadro M5000M, 8Gb RAM
32Gb RAM
PCIe Drive

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

First thing to try: turn off Generator in Photoshop's preferences  (top of the plug-ins section).

If that doesn't help, then zip the file and email it to ccox (at) adobe (dot) com and I'll take a look to see where it is slowing down.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Applying paragraph styles... I have always observe to be slow. I think... it occurs if you have 200+ layers

[jg1231]

Hello Chris and thanks for your quick reply!

I just sent you an email with an example file as you suggested. It's a file for my working process when designing an app. I work a lot with my wacom to Sketch Things fastly in Photoshop, such as Icons or graphics. And I use a lot of artboards to Experiment with different ideas or Looks. So the file might become pretty large.

I used to work with Fireworks before, where it was common for me to have 30+ pages and Fireworks always worked like a charm and never had performance issues. So I hope I can fix this with PS too...

Paragraphs are really helpful - but as you will see, every Change renders for a few seconds which is not great in a workflow. Imagine what Indesign Users would say when applying a paragparh style would perform like that ;-).

Concerning turning off Generator: Seems to make it a Little bit faster, but not as I would like to have it... Also turning off the rulers helped a Little bit.

Two days ago there was a new release of Nvidia Drivers, which seem to make PS faster and more responsive in my opinion.

Another question: what about the Cache Settings of PS? Can I tune them? Today I have 8 cache steps and 1024 KB size. Is there a better Setting for my files?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

[jg1231]

Jaroslav, that might be true, but imagine what InDesign users would say, when Paragraph styles would become so slow if they had 200+ objects in their document 😄 Really, if PS is targeting App or Interaction Designers (as me for example), it should behave like a professional tool for that purpose!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I agree with you. I am not advocating anyone.

I asked people if they use character styles and paragraph styles. Three of them tried it but nobody does use it during normal work because it is lagy and it does strange things.

[jg1231]

Sorry, was no accuse 🙂 Just wanted to bring an example for Adobe...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Cache levels and tile size depend a lot on the type of document you are working with.
Unless you have HUGE documents, you probably want 3 or 4 cache levels.
The tile size is harder to explain.  Filtering runs faster with large tiles, while file IO works faster with small tiles. And, of course, Your Mileage May Vary.

Yes, I agree performance shouldn't be that bad - which is why I spend a LOT of time profiling problem areas, finding the cause of the slowdowns, and fixing them (and occasionally educating others on appropriate use of algorithms and data structures).

I've just been given a flood of problem files to examine, but hopefully I can get to yours sometime today.

[jg1231]

Hey Chris, 
thanks a lot for taking a look at it, I really appreciate your efforts! Don't worry if you don't find the time today 🙂 Looking forward to your suggestions!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

First 8 files done, now looking at yours.

Moving things on that complex a canvas is slow unless you turn off smart guides.  (I'll look into that later)

I couldn't get paragraph style changes to take very long, until I changed Headline 80.
That will hang for about 6 seconds when you change the font, and again after you hit OK.
Alright, now to profile it.

1261 layers in your document. And the paragraph change seems to spend all it's time re-rendering type layers.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

OK, I think I found the cause of the slowdown.
Basically some of the type layers are re-rendering across the entire document (all 13.3k x 9.6k of it) instead of limiting themselves to the actual area of the text.  So this will get slower as you make the document larger by adding more artboards.
I need to talk to our text engineer and see what we can do about this.

[jg1231]

Chris, that's great! Hope it gets fixed, so working with text will be as pleasant as in InDesign 🙂 Thanks for your efforts!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Good news:  what I found was the cause of the slowdown, and my fix solved it.

The fix will be in the next major release of Photoshop. It needs a lot of testing, because I just changed the way all text renders in Photoshop (not the appearance, but the underlying mechanism to do the rendering - oh, boy did that scare some QE and managers).

After my fix, the remaining time is all spent rendering the actual text, and manipulating the text data structures (i.e.:  work that can't be avoided).  I've got a few ideas to make things a little better in the future, but they require large scale refactoring of the text code (make the data structures more efficient) and will take a lot more work and testing.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

So is this fix is present in CC2015.x or it will be in CC2016 ?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

It will be in the next major release. We can't say what that release might be called.

[jg1231]

Chris, that's really great that you found a fix to the issue! Will improve working a lot 🙂 Looking forward to the release & hope it will not take too long 😉
Thanks for your efforts!

[Jeffrey Tranberry]

This issue should be much better in the CC 2015.5 upgrade released today: https://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/2016/06/adobe-releases-major-photoshop-cc-update-today-and-announc...